Q.Would you add a comma before the quotation marks in the following sentences?
Ellie finally admitted, “They look different from before.”
Kat set the painting on the windowsill, muttering “One more to go.”
It would be more accurate to say “I made it up” than “I exaggerated.”
Mimicking Hector’s level of sass to perfection, Bel said, “Try to keep up.”
Continue reading "Is a Comma Needed to Introduce Dialogue?" »
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In the writers’ groups where I hang out online, these queries are evergreen:
The replies and comments are typically so head-spinning in their range and variety that no one could blame writers for being confused. And who can blame a writer for resisting an expense they aren’t convinced is necessary?
Continue reading "Does Your Novel Need a Copyeditor before Submission?" »
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Careless quoting is a writing crime. Fiction or nonfiction, a writer must be scrupulous in quoting words precisely and crediting their source. Most publishing contracts hold the author liable for misrepresentations and plagiarism, but even without that legal pressure, a writer, of all people, should naturally respect the intellectual property of others.
Writers of historical fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and books for children often handle source materials that provide background and authenticity to their stories. Sometimes they quote from published or unpublished writings; sometimes they quote from speeches or interviews or online videos. But the way they credit their sources ranges from providing pages of detailed citations to providing—nothing.
Let’s take a closer look at the writer’s challenges and responsibilities.
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Not all fictional characters are meant to be smooth-tongued and lyrical in their speech. Rather, just like us, they sometimes mumble or stumble. Giving a character flawed speech is a way to make dialogue more realistic. And this very human kind of talking often involves the use of interjections.
Continue reading "“Erg, no kidding?” Interjections in Creative Writing" »
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Almost every writer I know has a love-hate relationship with their writing program, whether it’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, or a yellow legal pad. It’s clear there’s no single perfect choice for drafting, editing, and formatting your work for publication.
Scrivener is great for drafting but has limited formatting capabilities. Docs is great for collaborations, and it can handle basic formatting, but it lacks compatibility with professional formatting and editing tools like PerfectIt and the add-ins from the Editorium. MS Word is the publishing workhorse, more or less required for submitting to agents and editors and publishers, but it’s pricey and not always friendly.
Getting to know your word processor better will help you love it more. Here are some moves you can use in Word and Docs and sometimes Scrivener.
Continue reading "3 Easy E-Tricks for Writers, and 1 for Fun" »
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Exclamation points are controversial. Writers can’t be blamed if they’re confused!
Exclamation has always announced straightforward shouting, alarm, surprise, excitement, amazement, disbelief, exasperation, or even just helpless flustering. In the eighteenth century, readers could expect melodrama:
And those were some of her last words! O how my eyes overflow! Don’t wonder to see the paper so blotted! (Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 43)
Exclamation points still serve in all those ways. But somewhere in the last century, the shouty little mark fell out of fashion in literary prose. Editors today frown on excessive exclaiming even in mainstream fiction, outside of books for young children and comic books. Plenty of passages worthy of alarm make do with commas, periods, or nothing:
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I don’t like to dither over style choices. At the beginning of a sentence, it’s routine to start the next word with a capital letter. But when I type a colon within a sentence, I often have to stop and think about how to write the next word: whether to cap it isn’t always obvious.
As I not-so-sneakily demonstrated above, Chicago style lowercases the first word after a colon within a sentence, even if the words after the colon are themselves a grammatically complete sentence (see CMOS 6.63):
They even relied on a chronological analogy: just as the Year II had overshadowed 1789, so the October Revolution had eclipsed that of February. [full sentence after the colon]
The watch came with a choice of three bands: stainless steel, plastic, or leather. [sentence fragment after the colon]
As always, there are exceptions.
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From our own reading, most of us know that some paperback and hardcover novels have a table of contents page in the front and some don’t. Lurking online, I perceive a widespread notion that tables of contents are old-fashioned and pointless for fiction. There’s also fear that a contents page wastes valuable marketing space in online “see inside” previews, preventing readers from getting to the good stuff that will tempt them to buy.
Why then do some best-selling, award-winning novels have a table of contents, sometimes several pages long? As you’ll see, sometimes it makes sense.
Continue reading "Does Your Novel Need a Table of Contents?" »
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One of my favorite MS Word tricks allows a novelist (or any book writer) to view and organize their chapters in the Navigation pane (an option under the View tab). Using this feature, I can see all my chapter titles at a glance, and I can go instantly to the one I want by clicking on its title. Moving a chapter to a different location is as easy as clicking and dragging it down the pane. Numbered chapters renumber themselves like magic any time I change their order.
If you ever need to add, delete, or move a chapter while you’re drafting, you can make good use of this trick.
Continue reading "How to Reorganize Book Chapters with a Click" »
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Narrators and characters in novels and other creative writing can talk about whatever they want. A character might read the Chicago Sun-Times; they might say they like to sing “Drivers License” while brushing their teeth. A narrator might mention a famous poem or novel or TV show: “The host didn’t mention that he’d heard the same joke on The Simpsons.”*
Writers often ask how to style such titles. With italics? Quotation marks? Title caps?
Continue reading "How to Mention a Real Newspaper, Book, or Song in Fiction" »
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Long before a book is printed, while the text is still in manuscript form, editors at publishing houses speak in terms of word count, not page count. An appropriate word count for a project depends on the kind of book. A picture book editor might think in terms of 0–750 words. An editor acquiring young-adult fantasy novels will consider anything from about 80,000 words and up. Thrillers, graphic novels, romances—their editors all have target ranges for the length of book readers expect. There are always exceptions, of course.
Page counts, on the other hand, are for printed books. Designers and production editors use a manuscript’s word count to estimate how many pages the published book will be, taking into account how they want it to look: how large the pages will be, how much white space is wanted, whether illustrations will add to the page count, etc.
Why then, at the querying stage, are writers almost always asked to submit a set number of pages instead of a set number of words?
Continue reading "Counting Pages or Words in a Manuscript Submission" »
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A piece of bossy advice often given to creative writers is to sweep through your manuscripts before you submit them and delete certain words. “Just,” “so,” “very,” and “really” vie for the top target, but the most popular prohibition of all might be of the word “that.”
Nothing is wrong with the word “that.” It’s frequently essential to the grammar or clarity of a sentence (see below). Yet we’re often told [that] it’s “unneeded.” I sense the ghosts of Strunk and White here. “Omit needless words,” they tell us, declaring (for instance) that the sentence “His story is strange” is “more vigorous” than “His story is a strange one” and therefore better.
But is vigorous always better? Do readers demand vigor at all times, from every sentence? Creative writers especially must ask, Is this character or narration meant to be vigorous?
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Blogging goals Coming up with ideas Promoting your blog Repurposing blog content Analytics, and how to avoid the rabbit hole Monetizing your blog Understanding the sales funnel Managing reader engagement Blogging trajectory: Deciding who to write for and when to stop
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Blogging goals Coming up with ideas Promoting your blog Repurposing blog content Analytics, and how to avoid the rabbit hole Monetizing your blog Understanding the sales funnel Managing reader engagement Blogging trajectory: Deciding who to write for and when to stop
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Recently, a question that went something like this appeared in a Facebook group for writers seeking help from book editors:
Help with this sentence please! “Some advice, for whoever/whomever is interested.” A friend said it should be “whoever” and my editor said “whomever.” How do you vote?
In the rollicking spirit of Facebook, grammar is routinely decided by ballot. The votes were all over the place. Some were based on the “feeling” of the voter. Some repeated what others had already said. There was at least one claim that the choice depends on whether you’re American or British or Australian. (It doesn’t.) And there was the requisite insult, causing an admin to throw down a caution.
Mainly, there was confusion. Not even the professional copyeditors knew for sure, although it didn’t stop them from holding forth. Two or three cited a source, evidently unaware of social-media etiquette.
Continue reading "“Whoever/Whomever” in Fiction: Which Should Your Character Use?" »
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People sometimes worry about honoring the personal pronouns of those who don’t identify with the gender binary. They’re concerned that using (for instance) “they/them” in place of “he/him” or “she/her” will be complicated or confusing. Some aren’t sure about the grammar (“They are” or “They is”?).
Overcoming entrenched speech habits to use the right pronoun consistently takes practice. But in writing, it’s easier. Plenty of creative writers use “they/them” pronouns (among others) for nonbinary characters.
Continue reading "Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Creative Writing" »
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I’ve written before to caution copyeditors against scrubbing voice and character out of fiction manuscripts by adhering too closely to a style manual.
Each novel or story is unique, of course. Some feature dialect and colloquialisms, and others pretty much stick to formal English as laid out in The Chicago Manual of Style. Many, many novels and stories mix it up, using formal English for the narrative while their characters speak in a more casual idiom. Keeping all those voices straight is one of the primary tasks of a writer; monitoring and protecting those distinctions is a primary task of an editor.
To make good writing and editing choices, it’s helpful to know what’s considered standard or formal in the first place, not in order to apply that knowledge indiscriminately, but to use it to create or edit narration and dialogue that’s consistently natural, real, and believable. That’s where a good dictionary and style guide come in. They help us determine what’s “grammatical” so we can choose when to reject it for the best effect.
To see how these intentional grammar “goofs” work in creative writing, let’s look at a few issues commonly faced by writers.
Continue reading "How Grammar “Goofs” Work in Creative Writing" »
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Do you sometimes dither over whether to put a comma between two or more adjectives?
a polished, spherical stone or a polished spherical stone?
a nice, big check or a nice big check?
Although the guidelines for deciding at CMOS 5.91 and CMOS 6.36–37 work well for any kind of writing, there are times when creative writers prefer to ignore them.
Continue reading "Commas between Adjectives in Creative Writing" »
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Anyone familiar with the grammar and style rules and guidelines in CMOS knows they come with a lot of qualifiers: normally, in most cases, in running text, in regular prose, depending on the context—I could go on and on. In life, very few rules are meant to cover every situation. The same is true in CMOS.
This is especially so when it comes to writing and editing marketing copy, something more and more authors are doing for themselves. Indie authors often design their own book covers and ads and write their own press releases. A few weeks ago we looked at the liberties we take when writing or editing blurbs. This week we’ll consider more visual types of promotion.
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A great many common abbreviations* behave perfectly well in any fiction or nonfiction context, including dialogue, when the general guidelines in CMOS are observed: Mr., Ms., CEO, p.m., PhD, UFO. Editors should have no quarrel with them, as long as they’re styled consistently. If it’s 11:00 a.m. in chapter 1, it shouldn’t be 2 PM in chapter 3. That’s what style sheets are for.
On the other hand, some of Chicago’s advice for wrangling abbreviations (see CMOS 10.3) can be safely ignored by fiction writers and editors. In a novel or short story,
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